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February 05, 2015

(++++) SMALL THINGS

A tale writ large of people
writ small, The Carpet People is
Terry Pratchett’s first book, written by a 17-year-old in 1971. Reconsidered
and somewhat reworked by Pratchett when he was 43 – so he says – it is now
offered at a time when Pratchett has become Sir Terry and is 66 years old. And
if it is probably impossible to disentangle all the 17-year-old’s material from
all the 43-year-old’s, it is also unnecessary, because this little epic, or
epic of the little, has enough of the 66-year-old Pratchett about it to show
that some things never change; or if they do, it is arguable to what extent the
change is for the better.

The scale of Pratchett’s
story here stands in wonderful and ongoing contrast to the scale of the
characters. The huge-in-this-book city of Ware, based on Rome in its days of
glorious empire, is the size of a period at the end of a sentence in our world,
so you can only imagine how unimaginably tiny the characters in the teeming
streets must be. And some of them are even smaller than that. This really is an
epic set within the strands of a carpet (and sometimes in the mysterious
“underlay”), where a burnt matchstick fallen from somewhere unimaginably high
up is a significant landmark and a lost penny (presumably one of the old
pre-decimalization British pennies) is mined by an entire tribe for many
generations with its surface barely being scraped.

Courage, goodness and evil
come in all sizes, of course, and the size here is small. But the characters
loom large in their adventures, which involve the usual good-vs.-evil overlay
upon a foundational quest, as well as a number of notions that Pratchett was to
explore in much greater detail in his Discworld
novels in later decades (the fact that some of these may be elements added by
Pratchett at age 43 to the concept of Pratchett at age 17 is largely
irrelevant). There is, for example, the comment by one of the good guys as he
heroically holds up a collapsing roof so others can escape and is asked what he
is doing, staying where everything is not only tumbling down but also on fire:
“‘Goin’ to be in a story,’” he says, in one of those “meta” moments when
characters almost realize they are in search of an author and have, indeed,
been found by one. Or there is the discussion by some of the good guys of the overdone
pronouncements of one of the chief bad guys, with resident and sometimes
tiresome philosopher Pismire (yes, Pratchett had an early talent for names)
saying, “‘Melodrama. I’m amazed he doesn’t go “Harharhar,”’” And sure enough, a
few lines later, the bad guy, Gormaleesh, “stepped back, and then said, ‘Your
threats I treat with scorn. Harharhar!’ Pismire nodded happily. Knew he would,
sooner or later, he said to himself.”

The usual characters of
grand heroic fantasy are all here, but they are all really tiny. There is the
tribe of sort-of prophets, who know the future but must not speak it, except
that one of them does, which causes complications and sort of nudges things in
one direction among the innumerable possibilities that the future holds. Questioned
about this one remarkable Wight, who turns out to be a sort of dea ex machine without portfolio known
as a thunorg, the good guy who has been the first to meet her says, ‘Don’t look
at me like that. You think I could make this sort of thing up?’” Well, no, he couldn’t, but Pratchett could, and did, and we
are all the better for it, given where this sort of making-it-up took the
author in later years.

Some comments in The Carpet People sound like much later
Pratchett, and maybe they are, but they fit well here anyway. For example, good
guy Snibril observes two groups of warriors, sworn enemies, who have come
together under his leadership, to the surprise of pretty much everyone,
including Snibril himself: “The Deftmenes are mad and the Dumii are sane,
thought Snibril, and that’s just the same as being mad except that it’s
quieter.” That is an observation worthy of an Unseen University scholar, or
perhaps even Granny Weatherwax, in a Discworld novel.

So The Carpet People has glimmers of later Pratchett in it, some
perhaps shoehorned in by Pratchett 43 to keep the work of Pratchett 17 more in
line with the thinking of the later author. Whatever sort of hybrid it is,
though, this book is filled with delights of its own, such as the very large
(by this book’s standards) and surprisingly intelligent pones (basically
elephants that look like dinosaurs crossed with dragons and have their own
language), and the inclusion of one single strange bit of spelling throughout
the book, with “eh” replaced by a sideways caret, so, for example, the word
“behind” is always written “b>ind.” The book also contains some utter
delights in the form of illustrations, in both color and black and white, by
Pratchett himself – pictures that show that while Pratchett’s calling is
certainly words rather than art, he’s no slouch at the representational stuff
either. The Carpet People is a
rousing adventure whose small scale readers will quickly forget as they become
lost in the twists, turns and tangles of a tale that charms not only on its own
but also in light of the far grander (but ultimately not all that different)
sorts of stories its creator was later to tell.